


Sui Generis

by Queue



Series: Northwest Passages [5]
Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-17
Updated: 2010-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:34:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/pseuds/Queue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ben and Ray prove that longtime partners never stop learning new things about one another. Serious warning: no one dies, major character or otherwise, and the story ends happily for all, but someone's serious past injury is recounted (not in great detail) and the discussion gets a bit intense. Other warnings: gratuitous waste of a perfectly good white-linen handkerchief in service of a duty it should not have had to perform; flashbacks containing acts of a sexual nature and mildly ridiculous high-school reminiscences; RayK in easy-access cutoffs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sui Generis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Skitz_phenom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skitz_phenom/gifts).



Of all battles, there are none like the unrecorded battles of the soul.  
\--Henry Ward Beecher, _Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit_

 

“…the road map of the soul.”

I’m not aware my thoughts have taken audible form until I feel Ray flinch: his head jerks infinitesimally against my legs, where he pillowed it at the start of our well-earned break from shoring up the walls on the cabin’s new addition, and the scruff of his silvering stubble (“No point shaving at oh dark thirty just for the birds and the bees, Frase”) rasps against my skin. He groans.

“Fraser, what have I told you about profundity in the morning? I am ninety-seven percent sure we had a deal about this.”

“A deal about what, Ray?” Surprising, how much pleasure I still derive from pushing his buttons. A skill I learned well before I was conscious of needing it, first to keep him at arm’s length and then…well. To provoke him to close that distance when I could not—a failing from which, thank God, I no longer suffer.

“About the random acts of poetry, Mountie Man.” One blue eye flicks open and studies me from his sideways vantage point, the sun-and-laughter creases around it deepening.

I gape at him for a moment, then begin to laugh.

“What?” Ray’s smiling, but he’s puzzled as well—a rare combination for him, and one of which I would enjoy taking full advantage were I in a less mellow mood.

Fortunately for his peace of mind, I’m feeling generous this morning: fall suits the Puget Sound’s islands, ours and others, and enhances my contentment with the day; and in three mild, creative hours we have done as much work on our cabin home as another whole day might have permitted us. I catch my breath and smile back at him. “It’s not poetry, Ray. Not as you’d define it, anyway.”

Ray snorts, eyes closing again. “Sounded like it to me. Way I figure it, any time you say something with ‘soul’ in it that don’t hearken back to the _kościół Rzymskokatolicki_ , it’s pretty much got to be Whitman or Tennyson or Brontë or whoever.”

“The Brontës were novelists,” I point out.

“Milton, then.” One of Ray’s long-fingered hands waves at me, lazily dismissive. “Donne. Shakespeare. William Carlos whatshisname. One of the eight million other guys in that doorstop anthology you keep on the bedside table. _Poets_ , is what I’m saying.” His voice drips affected scorn—our relationship’s button-pushing duties are equally shared and similarly enjoyed—and for a moment I consider rising to the implicit challenge. But no: in this case, as so often, the truth trumps invention.

“It’s not poetry,” I tell him. “It’s Buffy.”

“Say what?” Ray swings his body around from prone to kneeling astride me almost faster than my eyes can track him. Enviable flexibility for someone of his—our—age and experience.

But then, Ray has always been flexible.

Rarely credulous, however, as his skeptically raised eyebrow attests.

“Well,” I amend. “Perhaps not _precisely_ Buffy. The actress who played that part—”

“Sarah Michelle Gellar,” Ray supplies, almost automatically. His Trivial Pursuit victories are the stuff of legend in our family.

“Indeed. In a very different role, however, and one sadly devoid of any vampire _inamorata_ or Scooby snacks.”

“ _Gang_ , Fraser.” Ray glares at me. “Scooby _Gang_. Quit messing around and get on with it.”

“In a film released in 2007, called, if memory serves—”

“Which it always does, yadda yadda yadda, did I mention get on with it?”

“Called,” I repeat, “ _The Air I Breathe._ ”

“Fraser.” Ray’s right hand flicks out against my face in a mock slap. “As much of a surprise as this is probably gonna be to you, I don’t actually give a flying fuck about the title of the goddamn movie. What I want to know—and Christ knows _why_ I want to know, but I do—is about the road. What about the road?”

Amazingly, I understand his question. “Scars, Ray.”

“Scars.” Ray sits back abruptly on his heels, visibly nonplussed. “Wait, what? _Scars_ are the road map of the soul?”

“Indeed.”

“And what genius thought up _that_ piece of fortune-cookie crap?”

I eye him, surprised by his vehemence. “I’ve no idea, Ray, though I can find out if you li—”

Ray puts up a hand, and I stop. “No. No. Shit.” He sighs irritably and looks away from me. “ _Bull_ shit. Road map of the soul. Road map of the _stupid_ , more like. The suicidal, even.” He rocks back and stands up fast, moving towards the toolbox we’ve left near the completed part of the addition and rummaging in it as though his life—or mine—depended on his finding the precise tool for the job at hand.

Whatever that job has suddenly become.

Now it’s I who am nonplussed. Over the years we’ve spent together as partners and parents, Ray and I have worked (talked, argued, fought, shouted, loved) our way through any number of crises large and small. I had thought, after so long, that we had managed to thread our combined way between the mines sown helter-skelter throughout our particular fields, exploding all (and only) the ones that needed it and bearing the resulting pain resolutely for the sake of the subsequent healing.

It appears that I was wrong.

I rub hard at my temple, only then remembering that I still wear the work gloves I donned early this morning in preparation for our day of home construction and incipient sunburn. A sliver of untreated pine caught in the glove’s fibers cuts through the thin skin at my temple, drawing blood, and I utter a mild curse. Ray’s subliminal influence on my vocabulary has much to answer for.

As though he can hear my thoughts (or, more likely, my invective), Ray swings around, blowing out an exasperated breath at this new evidence of my unfailing ability to injure myself with ordinary objects. Extracting something from the toolbox on his way across the clearing where our (well, _my_ ) garden will be next spring and summer, he drops to the ground before me, collapsing crosslegged as easily as our children did in their very youngest days, picks up my hands in his and begins to strip off my work gloves, finger by finger.

There should be nothing erotic about this—indeed, I’m certain he intends no such thing—but my body’s response to his touch is as swift and sure now as it was our first day together, and I suppress a strong, abrupt shiver. It’s a giveaway reaction on a day this unseasonably warm, and the quick upward quirk of Ray’s lips in his otherwise expressionless face suggests my efforts are not entirely successful, but he continues with his task.

Finished with my hands, he produces an improbably clean handkerchief from the back pocket of his denim cut-offs— _my_ handkerchief, I suspect, since Ray ordinarily eschews such frivolities (and the laundry duties that accompany them)—and begins to dab at the cut on my temple, cradling my face with the unoccupied hand, tending to me with familiar but unexpected delicacy. His touch, roughly careful, sends the same spiky shivers through me as it always has, and I feel my nipples harden, my cock twitch strongly between my thighs against the fabric of my work pants.

Ray senses my reaction—as how can he not, holding me closely in his hands as he is—and an answering shiver runs through him. He peers up at me through his lashes, eyes more shadowed and opaque than his usual trusting clarity with me permits, mouth twisted in a self-mockingly crooked grin. This close, with bright autumn sunshine limning his face and only the beginnings of arousal to distract me, I can clearly see the faint line bisecting his left eyebrow, the unclosed holes in both ears, the thin white welt that scores the palm of his dabbing hand. Ray bears his fair share and more of time’s deliberate marks, each beloved to me as the whole man is beloved. I put up a hand and rub my thumb slowly across his eyebrow, feeling the faint but distinct alteration in texture when I reach the scar. The eyebrow arches under my touch, and I remember.

*****

 _“And this one?” My hands pause in their delicious, as-yet-unfamiliar task—unbuttoning the rough cotton of the shirt Ray wore to court today, the shirt I didn’t give him time to doff before I shoved him down flat on his back on the nearer hotel bed and brought him to orgasm with my mouth and hands—as a pale scar running parallel to his navel catches my eye. I’ve never seen Ray from this angle before—so many angles I haven’t seen in the short time we’ve been together, so many ways to want him—and I need to know everything about his body._

 _Everything about the whole man. I want it_ all. __

 _“Appendectomy.” Ray’s voice is lazy, his body loose; one hand ghosts over my hair as I kneel over him._

 _“Ah.” My fingers move again on the buttons, brushing against his still half-hard cock as I reach the bottom of the shirt. Ray jerks, then groans._

 _“Jesus, Fraser, you’re gonna kill me—which, don’t get me wrong, not a bad way to die, but I’d like to get you off before I pass out from how good this is, and that ain’t gonna happen if you keep touching me. Give me a minute here to recover, okay?”_

 _I smile, but I don’t stop touching him. I can’t. I don’t_ want _to. I slide my hands back up his body and push the sides of the shirt apart, run my palms over the warm planes of his chest and shoulders. My fingers stop at another scar, this one several inches above his right nipple. “This…this resembles a stab wound, Ray. How in the world—shouldn’t your Kevlar have covered it?”_

 _Ray contorts his body briefly, getting rid of the shirt and tossing it towards his open suitcase (of which it falls far short), then lies back down with a contented sigh. As though in imitation of my untutored caresses, his own long fingers begin stroking slowly up and down his body from clavicle to just under the waistband of his unfastened dress pants. I lick dry lips and watch, mesmerized._

 _“Well, it would have, yeah, if I’d been wearing it.” He grins at me. “Strange as it may seem, however, Kevlar was not part of the uniform at my high school, so when Danny Houlihan and I started messing around with the drama club’s stage swords and he tried to do that Robin Hood thrust-and-parry thing with me, I didn’t have any armor on but the leather shirt we’d swiped along with the swords. Turned out the club had borrowed everything from a local theatre called Babes with Blades that used real weapons—seriously dull, but not props. Tip of Danny’s sword went right through a hole in the leather and cut my chest.”_

 _“Good God, Ray.” I gape at him, momentarily distracted from his beauty and my reactions thereto. “You could have been killed. Seriously injured, at the very least.”_

 _“Nah. Danny didn’t have much arm strength—he could barely lift the damn thing, little say aim it at anything important. Only reason he actually connected was he underestimated the weight of the sword; it wrenched his elbow sideways and just happened to graze me as it took him down. Worst part was Dad made me pay to get the shirt cleaned.” My distress must show clearly on my face; the grin falls away from his and he pushes up on his elbows, peering at me. I put my hand out to his face, run my thumb over the small white line bisecting his left eyebrow. So many scars, signs of such a full, rich life—and that life could have ended before it had barely begun._

 _A cloud crosses Ray’s face, so quickly I almost miss it. What was that about? “Seriously, Fraser. It was a fluke, bad luck, that’s all. Anyway, I_ wasn’t _killed. I survived, I’m here! See?” His grin blazes up again and he spreads his arms wide, like an actor just before his triumphant bow, then flings himself backwards on the bed and lies there, flushed and laughing, temptation personified._

 _I shake my head and shift my hands to the top of his pants, electing to concentrate on current pleasure rather than past peril. “Miraculous. St. Jude must have been running a special that day.”_

 _Ray shouts with laughter. “Nice culturally sensitive reference, there, Frase.”_

 _I incline my head gravely. “I endeavor to give satisfaction, Ray. Lift up, if you please.”_

 _Ray raises his hips from the bed just long enough for me to pull his trousers and the soft grey garment he wears beneath them—boxers? briefs? an enticing thing, whatever it is—over the swell of his buttocks. I slide off him backwards, taking his remaining clothing with me, and kneel at the end of the bed to work it over his feet. The left one bears a tiny scar across the long bone of the foot, one I’ve never noticed before. Finished disrobing him, I take that foot in my hands and run my thumb along the scar. “Ray?”_

 _“Fraser?”_

 _“Is there a story here?”_

 _Ray tries to sit up, but I’m holding his foot off the floor and he can’t get the leverage he needs. He settles for pushing up on his elbows again and glaring at me. “Always the story man, aren’t you. Always gotta know the answers to all those journalism questions, who and what and why and where. Right now, Fraser, it’s time to stop thinking and knowing and get on with the_ feeling _. The feeling_ good _.”_

 _Incendiary words, a challenge and a promise all in one. I let go of his foot, stand up, and begin to make short work of my own clothing. Freed, Ray sits up to look at me, and his approving whistle brings color surging to my face and chest. “Mmmyeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Like the Byrds say, there’s a time for every purpose under heaven, and this right now?” He pats the bed beside him. “This is the time for you to come back here and let me get my hands on you and pay you back for that fucking incredible blowjob you ambushed me with by making you come your brains out.”_

 _I don’t bother responding to this delightful suggestion in words, in large part because I can think of none that would suffice. Instead, I get back on the bed, knees on either side of Ray’s legs, and begin to crawl up his body. He slides down under me, hands reaching for any part of me he can touch, muttering “yeah” and “Fraser” and “want you” and “finally, God, finally” until I am perilously close to coming just from the sound of his voice. I lower myself until we are touching all along the length of our bodies, our cocks slippery and hot where they rub together, and thrust once against him, groaning despite myself at the feel of his skin on mine._

 _Ray’s answering groan—as his hands come up to hold my head and angle it for the onslaught of his kiss, as his knees come up on either side of my hips and he answers me thrust for thrust—tells me the only story I need to know._

 _For now._

*****

“…Fraser? Frase? Hello?” A sudden, ephemerally sharp pain above my ear recalls me abruptly to myself: to this day, this time, this same beloved man.

Who has, it appears, just brought me out of reverie by knocking on my head as though it were a door.

I blink at him, open my mouth to retort, then think better of it. He grins at me, eyes still shadowed by something as yet unspoken. “Wise choice. Had to do something, after all, to bring you out of whatever weird trance you went into just now. Where’d you go, Fraser?” His hands return to my face and he resumes his self-appointed task.

“Memories,” I say absently, thinking back over that particular one—our first time in a hotel, only the third or fourth time we’d slept together, marvelous and unaccustomed and _right_ —trying to discover what might have triggered that specific remembrance.

“Good ones, I hope.”

“Oh, yes. Most definitely.”

“Glad to hear it.” Ray makes a final pass at my temple with the handkerchief and my eyes shift briefly to the cloth, assessing the degree to which it might be salvageable. He sees the movement and misinterprets it, quirking another wry smile at me. “Don’t worry, pretty boy, it’s not gonna scar.”

An open door back to where this morning took an unexpected step astray. Surely it would be churlish on my part not to walk through it. “Since you mention it, Ray—and not that I’m not grateful for your tender ministrations, although I resent the accompanying appellation—”

“Fraser. Quit polysyllabling around the subject. You wanna know why I had a minor freakout over a Buffy quote.”

“…in a manner of speaking, yes. What did I say that bothered you?”

Ray drops his hands from my face to what I now see is the small first-aid kit from our toolbox, pulling from it antibiotic ointment and one of the butterfly bandages we seem always to be replenishing. “Don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said it was nothing.”

“No, I don’t suppose I would,” I say dryly.

“Didn’t think so.” He sighs, unscrews the top of the ointment and squeezes some out onto his fingertips, and begins to smooth it across the small cut on my temple. “It wasn’t you, by the way. You didn’t bother me. It’s just… it bugged me, that image. Scars as the road map of the soul. I never heard that before, and it got to me, got me thinking. If that’s true…I mean, your soul’s supposed to be a _good_ thing. A perfect one. Shiny. Pure. Blessed. All that. Like a piece of God that got stuck somehow in you but still managed to stay bright and beautiful and good. One of the nuns at my middle school used to call it ‘God’s treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.’”

“A poetic turn of phrase, if not her own.”

Ray winces. “Yeah, well, she was also the one who like to tell us discipline problems that ‘the soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.’”

First Beecher, now Sophocles. Odd reading for a Roman Catholic nun. But I keep my mouth shut; this is not the time to show off my accidental erudition, and I think we may be getting to the crux of the problem.

Ray wipes the remaining ointment on the ragged edge of his cut-offs, picks up the butterfly bandage and exposes its adhesive sides, and places it carefully on my temple. “And see, Fraser, that right there is my problem with the whole scars-and-soul thing. If scars really are the road map of the soul … well, as fucked-up as my map is, my soul’s gotta be a total mess by now, y’know? _One_ wickedness.” Task complete, he blows out a weak thing that wants to be a laugh but falls far short, turns his head away from me and gazes out past our cabin at the sunlit Sound. “I conceived so many of those over the years it’s not even funny. Seems like every single scar on my body came from one of those. Every one of them I got from being violent or reckless or stupid, making a bad decision or a self-destructive one.” He sighs unhappily, his shoulders tense.

“Oh, Ray.” I have a sense, now, of what lies behind Ray’s reaction to my earlier innocuous musings, and I think I may be able to fix the damage I’ve inadvertently wrought. “That simply isn’t true—and I can prove it.” Brushing the silver-brown hair back from the temple I can see, I tip Ray’s head and lay a soft kiss against the small patch of roughened skin just beyond his hairline. “Not this one, for example. I remember this one. I remember, because I made it.”

Ray’s eyes have closed, his hands fallen away from my face as he leans into my touch. He laughs wryly. “Too right you did. I didn’t let your ass anywhere near a wrench for a month after that. How anyone as competent as you could be so blue-ribbon bad with plumbing tools is totally beyond my ability to comprehend.”

“Mm,” I agree. “And this one…” I run my fingers along the scar in question, a long diagonal striping Ray’s left arm from inside his elbow to the point of his shoulder. “I remember this one as well, because I was there when you sustained the injury that led to it.”

Ray snorts, and his lips curve into a smile. “The one in a thousand idiotic bad guys who didn’t fall for your ‘Sir, I will now disarm you with the power of my gaze’ shtick, and he had to be the one with shitty aim.”

“Not the way I remember it, Ray.” I slide my hand down his arm, pick up that hand, begin to coax open the fingers that have clenched around the tube of ointment. His eyes stay closed. “The way I remember it, you pushed me—shoved me, in fact—sideways into the Police Auxiliary Guild’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade float just as the gentleman—”

“Gentleman. Hah.”

“Benefit of the doubt, Ray—the _gentleman_ in question shot at my heart,” I continue inexorably, laying the ointment aside in the grass. “And missed, thanks to your quick thinking—and the interposition of your body between mine and the trajectory of the gunman’s bullet.”

“Ruined my favorite Blackhawks t-shirt, though.” Ray’s heart isn’t quite in the pro forma grumble, but I’m grateful for the effort.

“I trust it was worth it, Ray.”

His eyes snap open in surprise, fixed on my face. “Of course. Yeah. Always. _Always_ , Ben.”

I kiss him—swiftly, hotly—and his unexpectedly desperate response tempts me sorely to push him backwards onto the leaf-spotted grass and try to get the rest of my message across with my body, rather than relying on mere words. But I’m not quite ready to do that yet, and I make myself pull back. I pick up the other hand and press my mouth to the thin welt there that scores his palm, bisecting the life line. “This one gave you a great deal of pain at the time, as I recall.”

“Burns always hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, even the first-degree ones. Serves me right, putting my hand down on that fucking cracked piston like I didn’t know any better after forty-plus years of messing with cars for fun and profit.” Ray’s voice has warmed, and I can feel the tension in his hands and arms ease. Time for my final move.

“And then there’s this one.” I slide my hand down along the front of his body. His eyes close again—feeling again, not thinking (odd that it should be my task today to remind him of emotion’s value)—as my hand moves over him, brushing his nipples through his thin grey t-shirt, tracing a path down from his navel, slipping my fingers briefly, teasingly, inside the waistband of his shorts, then sliding further to cup his balls in my palm through the warm, rough denim. Ray braces his hands on the ground behind him and tilts his hips up towards me, pushing his groin into my hand and breathing hard.

Another test of my resolve: so difficult for me to move my hand from that hot, cherished space; so easy simply to take him in hand and give him—give us both—blessed release.

But I am after a deeper release.

So I swallow hard—he is so beautiful like this—and persevere, shifting my hand a little and settling my fingers gently over a raised cord of scar tissue high on the inside of his right thigh.

“That one.” Ray is watching, not my hand, but my face. His chest rises and falls rapidly with the force of his breathing and his hips hitch up towards my hand occasionally, as though he can’t quite control them. But the coiled, wary tension has returned to his shoulders and his voice sounds tight.

“Yes.” My voice has tightened up as well. Unexpected, but hardly surprising, considering the source of this particular souvenir. “I was so frightened, Ray. Do you know that? So frightened, looking at all that blood in the alley behind the Rusty Rose and wondering how anyone could lose that much blood and still be alive.”

“I wondered about that myself,” Ray says almost conversationally.

“Did you, indeed.” I feel my jaw clench. Even after all this time, I still carry so much anger over this—over how close Ray came to losing his life in that godforsaken, trash-drenched Chicago alley.

And for the sake of—what? Details on a new and nasty drug lord, a tip on a rash of violent neighborhood robberies, the name of someone who’d seen an unsolved murder take place. That part of this vital story of ours has escaped me. I simply know that it must have been something alluring enough, even to a seasoned police detective, to take him to a late-night meeting with a longtime informant behind a dive bar shunned by all but the most hardened and indiscriminate drinkers.

An informant with an unsuspected drug habit who knew the detective habitually carried cash and a drop gun with high street value to such meetings.

An informant with an accomplice, lying low under the alley’s inevitable broken-down Dumpster, who shot the detective in the leg the moment he appeared and who helped the informant relieve him of wallet and gun before disappearing into the night.

A leg shot, meant to be a superficial slow-down wound to give the thieves time to escape, that the accomplice’s meth-shaky hands turned into a life-threatening injury when the bullet nicked the detective’s femoral artery.

Ray’s preternatural instincts, alerted to the accomplice’s presence through some involuntary movement at ground level, had given him just enough lead time to hit his cellphone’s speed-dial button for 911-Officer Down before the bullet tore through his leg. That lead time had saved his life, bringing the closest patrol car to the scene within three minutes, a passing EMT with a penchant for monitoring police-band frequencies hard on the uniforms’ heels. Between them, they’d slowed the bleeding and stabilized Ray enough to be moved to Cook County Hospital, where the surgeon on call turned out to specialize in vascular repair. She’d pieced the artery back together in record time, litres of Cook County’s emergency blood supply keeping Ray’s system going while she worked.

Afterwards, the police union offered Ray the services of a plastic surgeon at union expense for the ugly rough mess the accomplice’s bullet and the surgeon’s haste had made of his inner thigh. Ray declined. He hadn’t told me why, either then or through the years since, but in light of what today had brought to the surface I thought I understood.

“I didn’t do it deliberately, y’know.”

I blink, then focus. Ray’s pulse beats, fast and strong, against the fingers I have pressed to the uneven skin of his inner thigh. He’s still leaning back on his hands, still aroused, still watching my face. “I…”

“You wondered, didn’t you. As bad as you thought I was taking Stella’s marriage to Orsini, as much as I wanted that transfer to the One-Six after Madame Minor made bail and two more child whores went missing on my watch…you thought I might have gone looking for suicide by bad guy.”

It’s not a question, and I don’t respond to it as one. “Yes.” Strange, how just that one stark word eases pressure in my chest I hadn’t known was there. “Yes, I did. We weren’t … we hadn’t … I had no claim on you—none that anyone else would recognize—and yet you had already become such an intrinsic part of me, of who I was, that I couldn’t imagine life without you. But there I was, hat literally in hand, standing in that alley looking at your blood on the ground and wondering how I was supposed to go on breathing without you in the world.”

The compassion in Ray’s gaze nearly undoes me, but I stiffen my spine—training _über alles_ , after all—and meet his eyes.

“For once, Ben, it was what it looked like. I trusted the wrong person. I made a bad call. I took the fall, and I took the consequences. That’s it. I promise.”

Not a word either of us uses lightly. I nod, and for a moment I am blinded by the light of his approving smile.

Then his eyes harden, and his mouth as well, and he looks at me again: defensive, angry, steeling himself for a fight.

“So okay. Scars. Stories. What’s your point, Fraser? What’s your goddamned _point_?”

I take in a breath, bring myself back to where we are: not me, not _me_ , but _Ray_. “My point, Ray, is that your scars do not define your soul. They don’t define your character, your morals, your virtue, your worth. They are part of you—a visible part, easy to see and to judge yourself by—but they are just that: a _part_. Each of them has a story. Many of them, like this one”—my fingers tighten on Ray’s scarred thigh, but he does not flinch—“have more than one story to tell. And each of those stories says something important about you, about who you were when you had the experience that scarred you in that way. Those stories, and their external manifestations, are a portion of what makes you who you are, unique and flawed and accomplished and weary and _alive_. They are a _portion_ of your soul. But they are no more the sum total of you than what you wear, or where you live, or who”—I pause, abruptly short of breath—“or who you love.”

He’s gone still under my hands, his eyes all pupil and fixed on my face as though memorizing me, and for long moments we are silent together. I will him to understand me, as little as I know my will has to do with any such outcome.

“You—you believe that, Fraser? Really, seriously? That the shit we do—the things that mark us up, inside and out—that they’re not somehow all we are, all we get to be? All we’re _capable_ of being?”

“I do, Ray. Yes.”

He tilts his head to one side and studies me. I close my eyes and let him look, and hope to God he finds what he needs in what he sees.

Finally I feel his hands reach out for mine, gather them in his. “I love you, y’know.”

“And I you, Ray.” I open my eyes and smile at him, feeling a rush of relief at the absence of fear and the abundance of warmth and regard in his face. I bring our joined hands to my lips and lay my face against them for a moment. They open under my touch, cup my face and bring my mouth to his. I hum appreciatively at him, and his lips curve against mine before he licks his way into my mouth, taking me in a long, drugging kiss that feels somehow of a piece with our surroundings and the difficult warmth of the day.

Some immeasurable time later I break the kiss, needing to breathe, my body alive with wanting him. Alive. Here. With me. Miraculous, necessary, desired. I rest my forehead against his, panting.

“God, Ray, I want you.” The longing for his touch, his warmth, his surrender may be less all-consuming now than it was when we first came together nearly twenty years ago, but it is no less constant.

“Yeah?” He wiggles his eyebrows at me. I choke on a laugh, but its tenure is brief: I have other things on my mind at the moment.

“Yes. _Oh_ , yes.” I kiss him again, biting and sucking at his lower lip. He shudders, and his hands come up to clutch at my shoulders.

“You got me. How?”

“Here. Now.” I bring my hands up between us, flatten them against his chest and push him over, bearing him down onto his back and coming down on top of him. My eyes close against the pleasure—too much, too soon, so much more I want to do to him. I force them open and look at his face, more familiar to me even than my own.

“What, here? Now? What will the neighbors think?” Ray teases me breathlessly, even as his long legs part for the thrust of my hips between them.

I raise one eyebrow at him, sliding one hand down to cup his cock through the denim again as the other hand captures both thin wrists and anchors them to the ground above his head. “I do apologize for the inconvenience, Ray. Did you have somewhere more urgent to be? I wouldn’t want to keep you…”

“No, no, ‘s okay, here and now works just fine for me,” Ray says thickly, hips arching under mine as I bring our bodies more fully into alignment. “A kept man, that’s me. Yeah, keep me, Fraser…keep me, hang onto me, do whatever you want with me, make me yours, never let me go, God, _God_ …”

~

Afterwards, as we lie together in the welter of our hastily shed clothing, I find myself … wondering. Ray has never been much for post-sex small talk, nor am I generally inclined to loquacity at such times. Despite that, I have to ask.

“Ray?” He groans, stretching pleasurably against me, and turns to lie with his head pillowed on my shoulder. “Ray? Are you…” I swallow, unexpectedly unsure. “Are you okay?”

The eye I can see opens halfway, then closes again. “Hell, yeah, Frase. Why wouldn’ I be?”

A good question, and one I rather hoped he’d answer. Over the years, I have discovered intimacy’s utility in disarming Ray’s defensive tactics and discovering his truths, sometimes to his surprise. I had thought this might be one such time. I think he heard what I was trying to tell him about the dictates and composition of the soul, but I am not entirely convinced he believed what I said—he carefully avoided saying anything of the kind—and I thought perhaps, relaxed and reassured by love, he might give me a clearer idea of what’s troubling him.

I try again to give him an opening to do so, despite the lethargy stealing rapidly over me. “Ray? Do you— are you— is there anything—” I can’t find the right words, the way to invite him to further confidence; my sated brain simply won’t provide it. One final question, then. “Are we okay?”

“Never better, Ben. Prom— ‘s all good. Love you. Love…yeah, oh…” Ray’s voice trails off on a sigh and he burrows his head deeper into my shoulder.

I shift to accommodate him, tucking the other hand behind my head as a makeshift pillow, and finally let my body relax fully into the moment. As ever, making love with Ray has pared away the excrescences of everyday life, the worries of the world, and brought us back to Moebian peace. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Sleep takes me over, and I fall into its reassuring embrace.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the ever-awesome Spuffyduds for shoving me almost bodily out of the writers'-block quicksand in which I'd become enmired. Her prompt seeded this story, though the actual scenario it contained isn't here (that one wanted to be a story all its own!). Thanks, too, to Skitz_phenom, my recipient, whose request sparked one of the very few things I wrote this year. I batted .665 on your prompt, I think; I hope it works for you nonetheless.


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